Sharknado: SyFy's Quirky Horror Movie Is a Hit – on Twitter

How about this as a horror-movie concept? A mad scientist is convinced that within the large, strange brain of the shark lurks an untapped skill for written communication. What if a shark could be trained to post on Facebook? No – Twitter! Yes, yes, why not Twitter?!

The scientist is right! Then things go horribly awry when the beasts, routinely fed a chum of vitamins, radioactive materials and laptop circuitry, learn to compress themselves into 140 characters or less, disguising tail and fin with tempting hashtags like #HaveASnack. Click on an innocuous-looking Tweet and you may end up saying goodbye to your hand, your arm, your intestines – your life.

Syfy's two-hour schlock masterpiece Sharknado wasn't quite that: It was, as the blunt mash-up of a title suggests, about sharks blown inland by storms and dropping on people like so many saw-toothed cicadas. But the sheer cheeky nuttiness of it all – plus a cast that included Ian "I Have Danced at Chippendales" Ziering and Tara Reid – caused a Twitter feeding frenzy when it aired Thursday night.

The numbers, according to Variety, are by no means record-setting, but they're pretty impressive – it was the most Tweeted-show of the night, with 5,000 tweets a minute for a total of 318,232 during the broadcast.

Syfy trots out these jokey horror movies with some regularity (last summer there was even a Jersey Shore Shark Attack that parodied the MTV reality show). But this one, which can trace its history all the way back to a classic old Saturday Night Live skit called "Land Shark," seemed to tip the scales in terms of curiosity, possibly because it arrived in the dead air of post-July 4, when a lot of programming is just fish wrapped in newspaper.

And, after all, it showed sharks swirling around in giant cloud funnels like coffee grounds in a jar of water.

This is also probably the first time I've heard the line, "Oh, crap! Look at all those sharks!" by someone in a chopper.